Turn-of-the-Century Cabaret: Paris, Barcelona, Berlin, Munich, Vienna, Cracow, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Zurich by Harold B. Segel (review)

Kniazhnins and Khmelnitskys laid the groundwork for later triumphs by Pushkin, Gogol, even Chekhov, and also contributed significant work of their own. Karlinsky focuses on the century, from 1730-1830, in which secular drama swept toward a rationality apotheosized in the neoclassical tragedies, sentimental dramas, prose comedies, magic operas and, especially, the verse comedies of young Pushkin's generation. Not only does Karlinsky manage to animate these individual texts; he also tells, with an ease and charm that befit his subject, the story of the vigorous literary life, with its movements, institutions, role models, and rivalries, that came to find its lifeblood in the theatre. Part of this story also involves Karlinsky's recuperation, along the way, of plays and playwrights from the distortions of ideological criticism, both political and aesthetic. While Karlinsky's lively literary history adds a great deal to our knowledge of this period, it is unfortunate for theatre studies that the history of the productions themselves concerns him only tangentially. One wishes now for as detailed and lively a volume on eighteenth-century theatres and acting styles. Sally Banes Turn-of-the-Century Cabaret: Paris, Barcelona, Berlin, Munich, Vienna, Cracow, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Zurich Harold B. Segel Columbia University Press, 418 pp.; $30.00 (cloth) Readers now have Harold Segel to thank for setting down with detached authority cabaret's detour-filled history. He makes a deliberately anarchic form manageable, yet never forgets that cabaret can only be defined in terms of its variations. His subject demands such a flexible historian, one able to start over in each new city and assess how its artists reinvented cabaret to serve local needs. Segel's strongest chapters, then, are those that challenge prevalent notions of cabaret performance. Other artists no less significant than Bruant and Wedekind helped transform recreational, after-hours entertainment into a true "art of small forms." Segel does an important service in introducing readers to Pere Romeau, whose Four Cats cabaret in Barcelona ignited Catalonian modernism and helped form the young Picasso. The sections on Vienna's Fledermaus handily prove that cabaret could be more than songs and puppet shows: there it thrived on Peter Altenberg's warmly satiric feuilletons. Segel has the most to offer in the chapters on Poland and Russia, his scholarly specialties. He so enthusiastically describes how Tadeusz Boy-Zele~iski transformed Cracow's Green Balloon cabaret into a model for modernist risk-taking that one comes away hoping for this writer's American discovery. And by chronicling the careers of irrepressible 94 cabaretiers Baliev and Evreinov, Segel reminds us that the history of Russian theatre doesn't begin and end with the Art Theatre. Segel's book disappoints only in those chapters where he re-maps familiar ground. His description of the Chat Noir adds little more than program excerpts to the illuminating work of Jerrold Seigel. Munich's Eleven Executioners and Zurich's Cabaret Voltaire have likewise been the subject of studies more comprehensive and sophisticated than Segel's. These sections also suffer from insufficient attention to context-criticism more formalistic than Segel displays in his Eastern European chapters, where his grasp of theatre history and social politics fuels his understanding of cabaret. Most irritating-and easiest to avoid-is the lack of forceful editing throughout the book. Too much circular analysis, repetitionand flat writing mar what is otherwise a valuable addition to performance scholarship . Marc Robinson Travels in Hyperreality Umberto Eco Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 236 pp.; $15.95 (cloth) Eco, as well known for his fiction as for his work in semiotics and readerresponse criticism, reveals himself here to be equally gifted in the art of the popular essay. Most of these twenty-six pieces first appeared in Italian newspapers and magazines between 1967 and 1984, and they demonstrate not only the diversity of Eco's thought but also his range as a writer. "Hyperreality" is the landscape of American fantasy. It is also an attitude, a way of life, and an ideology. Eco meticulously picks apart places like Graceland, Disneyland, the Getty Museum, and San Simeon-self-made monuments of media-made men-but he also dissects numerous less famous follies: obscure wax museums, re-creations of...